Vendor Portal Development

Portal Developed for Healthcare Professionals to Access a Member's Only Marketplace

Project: Vendor Portal Development

Client: Hospital Association

The hospital association was founded in 1898 and represents some 5,000 hospitals and other health care providers and over 40,000 individual members from various health care fields. It acts as an advocate in national health care policy development and provides a wide variety of services to its members.

Challenge: Current Marketplace Needs Enhancement

The on-line, interactive marketplace where healthcare professionals search for products and services, rate and review performance, and collaborate with a trusted network of peers and experts. Members may join as a healthcare professional or vendor, and create an account profile. Once logged in, they have access to a dashboard that delivers topic suggestions, activity updates from their network, RFI opportunities, and statistics of how product listings are performing.

The online marketplace, built on Liferay's open source enterprise platform, launched in late 2013. The hospital association needed to expand the site's functionality, including the introduction of a subscription-based revenue model for its vendor members.

Solution: Dunn Solutions Selected to Implement Subscription Model

Dunn Solutions, a Platinum Liferay Services Partner, was chosen to lead this next phase of the marketplaces development. The Dunn Solutions team first implemented some much awaited enhancements. Next was the largest part of this development phase: the integration of a hosted subscription-based eCommerce technology. This allows the organization to charge vendors a subscription fee to list their products and services (the site remains free to health care professionals). Payment processing, and customer and subscription management features, including renewal and account status notifications, were enabled. Integration with the organization's marketing automation tool and web analytics tool was also added to give the marketing team insight into user behaviors.

Result: New Revenue Model Achieved and Additional Development Planned

This enhanced marketplace is now a new source of revenue for the hospital association. Dunn Solutions is providing ongoing support and will lead future developments that include: introducing a vendor self-service function for the onboarding of new vendors (rather than dealing with a hospital agent); better enabling vendors to leverage the benefits of their membership; improved search capabilities; and growing the marketplace by enabling free memberships with other affiliated member groups.